Under the law, which mirrored a 1994 federal law passed to require colleges to file reports on their athletic departments, each of the state's school districts, vocational-technical schools and charter schools had to begin filing annual reports about their sports programs in 2013.

The exhaustive reports detail how boys' and girls' athletic opportunities match up in middle school and high school.

Numbers and participants on teams, compensation of coaches, time allocation of trainers, sports team histories and spending on equipment, travel and uniforms are among the things that must be taken into account.

School districts, vocational-technical schools and charter schools, referred to as local education agencies (LEAs) by the state, and the Pennsylvania Department of Education publish the reports online.

"There is no penalty for a local education agency (LEA) that did not respond," said Tim Eller, press secretary and director of press and communications for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, in an e-mail.

"There were 655 eligible LEAs and 459 completed and submitted their disclosure forms [in 2013]. The law does not require the department to do an in-depth analysis of the data."

It is a reporting law that carries no direct penalties if gender-equity disparities are found in a given school district. But it does generate information that could be used to support traditional civil rights enforcement remedies under Title IX, the 1972 federal law that mandates equity in sports and academics at all schools receiving federal money.

"When I've gone to workshops that have talked about this Title IX reporting, one of the things they stress over and over at the high school level is we are simply reporting information," Cedar Cliff athletic director John Kosydar said. "Now there could be a day where auditors come in and they start auditing you and things like that. What impact will that have?"

The initial 2013 reports only required the accounting of school district expenditures on athletics. Starting with the 2014 reports, funds generated by booster clubs, alumni and other non-school sources also must be included.

By fundraising and soliciting donations, Cedar Cliff football supporters have raised about $200,000 and Penn Manor football supporters about $220,000 to fund the Ireland trip. Neither school district is footing the travel bill.

Those sums will create sizable accounting blips when the schools file their disclosure reports. Since the football game, scheduled to be played on Aug. 29, is part of the 2014-15 school year, it will be part of the reports the districts file in 2015.

"If you're looking at it and don't know anything about the area," said Dr. Michael Leichliter, superintendent of the Penn Manor School District, "you're going to think, What's going on with the Penn Manor School District? They are really spending unequally for their boys' football team. I just think that's totally contrary to the original intent of what Title IX is about. Title IX is to provide equal opportunity for boys and girls. We're doing that. It wasn't to drill down to the individual dollar amount spent by parent boosters.

"A quarter-million-dollar expenditure by the booster club from Penn Manor is the kind of thing that, I believe, is going to raise the ire of some people across the state, which will lead to either community pressure, statewide pressure or the excuse to pass further legislation regulating high school sports."

The Pennsylvania law, pushed by retired state Sen. Mary Jo White, R-Venango, passed as an amendment to the state school code during the 40th anniversary year of the passage of Title IX.

State Rep. Mike Sturla, D-Lancaster, whose district does not include Penn Manor, which is located in Lancaster County, supports the law.

"The original intent was to make sure that girls' sports don't get shortchanged," Sturla said. "I understand that there are some schools that are concerned that this reporting is a burden, and that particularly trying to get some of the information from the booster clubs and things like that is a burden.

"Ultimately, I think, the purpose is to try and make sure that girls' sports don't get the short end of the stick here, and to maybe at least have accurate information to make that determination as to whether or not they're getting the short end of the stick."

Fine print

At Penn Manor, the task fell to athletic director Jeff Roth and district business manager Chris Johnston to compile the inaugural 2013 state report. Oct. 15 is the deadline to submit 2014 reports.

"That was a job in itself, I think, for all of us at the high school level," Roth said. "In high school athletics, the athletic director is the point person for everything in the athletic department.

"We don't have a department of people like a college would that would have people responsible for Title IX reporting. It basically falls on us and another administrator mostly that would be involved like my business manager."

It was a complicated accounting challenge in both scope and specifics, Johnston said, for a report that ran to nearly 19,000 lines on his spreadsheet.

"It took a lot of effort by my staff here to pull the information together," Johnston said. "It was a pretty sizable effort. I sat down with Jeff Roth and we had to go through and actually pull all the invoices that pertained to everything athletic. We had to go through and try to determine who it affected."

College teams have separate budgets, Johnston noted, while all teams are subsumed into a single budget in high school.

How do you break down allocations for maintenance of facilities used by multiple teams or bus trips shared by multiple teams? For a participation count, how do you designate an athlete who might start a season on a junior varsity roster and move up to a varsity roster?

"It was a massive undertaking, to say the least," said Tammi Jones, the West Shore School District's director of secondary education, who said she spent 35 to 45 hours putting together Cedar Cliff's inaugural 2013 report.

"The comparison here, it's not an exact science. So it will be interesting to see the perspective that is taken and the parallels that one tries to draw on the data that was reported."

With non-school contributions being added to the equation for 2014, more rigorous accounting will be required from booster groups.

"Before with boosters, we were really looking at a beginning balance," Jones said. "We examined their revenue and examined their expenses and then an ending balance.

"We're already in the stages and have the groundwork laid for how that information is reported to the school district by each booster club. They report their revenues, they report their expenditures and the fundraising and all the activities they do and specifically what it is those funds are used for."

Said Cedar Cliff football coach Colin Gillen: "Our boosters have been great, extremely organized, in terms of researching how that works and how that all fits together and also working with the district in order to make sure that everything we do is above reproach with that."

Sherri Breneman is president of Cedar Cliff's football booster club.

"I know that they've required some more detailed accounting from us on how we spend our money," Breneman said.

"We do what they ask. That's such a broader topic than just the football team."

Though there are added requirements for 2014, Kosydar said, much of the process figures to be more seamless the second time through.

"Once you do it the one year, you kind of understand what they're looking for, you kind of understand the framework a little bit better," said Kosydar, who was AD at Lancaster County's Warwick High when that school processed its inaugural disclosure report in 2013. "So as long as they don't change the form on us, I think it's going to be a lot easier to accomplish this summer."